Abstract

Nowadays, mineral additives due to the advantages such as evaluation of waste for ecological balance, improving the physical and mechanical properties of cement or concrete a wide field of use are found. Two of the waste materials are silica fume and fly ash. This study aims to determine mutual influence of fly ash and silica fume with Portland cement. For this purpose, physical, chemical, mineralogical and molecular were applied to these raw materials. The results indicated that fly ash and silica fume have shown different surface features compared to Portland cement. These variations effected on compressive strength of mortar samples. The ternary use of fly ash and silica fume provided the best performance, when the compressive strength properties of the cement mortars were taken into account.

Key words: Portland cement, fly ash, silica fume, FT-IR, XRD, setting time, water demand, compressive strength.